Giant alien 'megastructures' found to be orbiting star

[Maria]

The Milky Way is the cloudy cluster of millions of stars as seen on the right of this photo.

Jason Wright, an astronomer from Penn State University, is set to publish a report on the “bizarre” star system suggesting the objects could be a “swarm of megastructures”, according to a new report.

I was fascinated by how crazy it looked,” Wright told The Atlantic. “Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider, but this looked like something you would expect an alien civilization to build.”

The snappily named KIC 8462852 star lies just above the Milky Way between the constellations Cygnus and Lyra. It first attracted the attention of astronomers in 2009 when the Kepler Space Telescope identified it as a candidate for having orbiting Earth-like planets.

continue reading at http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world ... =og.shares

[Maria]

... Decades ago, physicist Freeman Dyson popularized an interesting idea: What if we built thousands of gigantic solar panels, kilometers across, and put them in orbit around the Sun? They’d capture sunlight, convert it to energy, and that could be beamed to Earth for our use. Need more power? Build more panels! An advanced civilization could eventually build millions, billions of them.

This idea evolved into what’s called a Dyson Sphere, a gigantic sphere that completely encloses a star. It was popular back in the 1970s and 80s; there was even an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation about one. Dyson never really meant that we’d build an actual sphere; just lots of little panels that might mimic one.

But it raises an interesting possibility for detecting alien life. Such a sphere would be dark in visible light but emit a lot of infrared. People have looked for them, but we’ve never seen one (obviously).

Which brings us back to KIC 8462852. What if we caught an advanced alien civilization in the process of building such an artifact? Huge panels (or clusters of them) hundreds of thousands of kilometers across, and oddly-shaped, could produce the dips we see in that star’s light.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronom ... fling.html

Or this could be a Wag the Dog demonic scenario that fascinates us, take us away from keeping our minds on God, and leads us away from the faith. Such is Star Trek.

[Maria]

I love this picture of the Milky Way, that massive cloud of millions of stars that seems to be erupting from the two volcanoes. Mt. Shasta is the largest one.

When my dad, an astrophysicist who worked at Lawrence Livermore, was alive, he would take us on trips to the desert far away from the city lights to see the Milky Way. Yes, he took us to Mt. Shasta several times. It was awesome! He would mention that perhaps mankind would someday discover life on other planets with a solar system much like our own. Yet, even in the star systems, God is everywhere present, and so, we quickly realized that God keeps the planets and stars in their places. We have an awesome God.

[Maria]

Here is an interesting story:

Collision course

Not only is the Milky Way spinning, it is also moving through the universe. Despite how empty space might appear in the movies, it is filled with dust and gas — and other galaxies. The massive collections of stars are constantly crashing into one another, and the Milky Way is not immune.

In about four billion years, the Milky Way will collide with its nearest neighbor, the Andromeda Galaxy. The two are rushing towards each other at about 70 miles per second (112 km per second). When they collide, they will provide a fresh influx of material that will kick of star formation anew.

The Andromeda Galaxy is obviously not the most careful of drivers. It shows signs of having already crashed into another galaxy in the past. Although it is the same age as the Milky Way, it hosts a large ring of dust in its center, and several older stars.
http://www.space.com/19915-milky-way-galaxy.html

and look at this fantastic picture --- yes, it is not photoshopped. Sometimes reality is stranger than fiction:

This photo illustration depicts a view of the night sky just before the predicted merger between our Milky Way galaxy and the neighboring Andromeda galaxy. Image released May 31, 2012.
Credit: NASA, ESA, Z. Levay and R. van der Marel (STScI), and A. Mellinge

[Cyprian]

Greetings Maria.

Most of the outrageous claims put forward by these articles are pure folly. They are mere fabrications and vain imaginings of atheistic pseudo-scientists. All of us should strive to unlearn the plethora of falsehoods that we have been constantly subjected to from our youth.

It starts with familiarizing ourselves with the cosmological paradigm presented to us by Sacred Scripture, in light of the consensus view of Holy Church.

Let's start with a few basics. You mentioned something about "perhaps mankind would someday discover life on other planets with a solar system much like our own."

To begin with, the earth is not a planet, and the Holy Fathers in their writings do not refer to Earth as a planet. They do speak in terms of the sun being a planet, since planet means to wander, hence for something to be a planet, it has to be in motion. The notion of the earth as a planet only began to gain acceptance in the 17th century, among the pseudo-scientists.

The Divine Scriptures and the Holy Fathers, in harmonious accord with one another, speak in terms of the earth being motionless, not rotating on its axis, at the center of the universe.

The Holy Fathers never entertained absurd notions of life on "other planets" [sic], or billions of solar systems. This is all completely preposterous and nonsensical and an obvious philosophical fabrication embraced by modern pseudo-science.

In the 8th century writings of St. John of Damascus in the East, and St. Bede in the West, both state that the moon and stars derive their light from the sun, and do not possess their own power of giving forth light. So it is by no means proven or established that there are billions of suns out there similar to our own, as they would have us believe.